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During my flight training, I was always taught that a highway or paved road was the last place to land in an emergency. For one, power lines tend to cross paved roads and by the time you can see them, it's too late to avoid them. Another is that it endangers others on the ground. Many pilots lose their lives trying to save the plane in an emergency. The best advice I got during my training was that when the plane quits on you, it's now your life boat. Use it to save your life, don't risk yours to save it.

During my flight training I also worked at a small GA airport. I got to know a lot of the pilots there. One owned a construction company and would often fly over his construction sites to survey them from the air. He came out that morning, I filled up his plane and he never returned. I didn't think much of it, although he rented a hangar from us, he also had a private air strip too.

A few days later, I found out that he was killed making an emergency landing. While flying over the construction site, his engine quit and he tried to land on a road. A car pulled out from a side street and he pulled up to avoid it. The landing gear snagged a power line, which caused it to nose dive into the ground and rupture the fuel tanks. It caught fire, and people tried to get to him to pull him out. They said he appeared to be alive and trying to get out, but the fire spread too fast.

The way I found out was a bit shocking. Investigators from the NTSB showed up to review our fuel and maintenance logs. We have to perform daily tests on the fuel and equipment, and I was the one that did those tests the day he was killed. It wasn't the fuel that caused the engine to quit, but that thought that maybe I screwed up the test and caused it and knowing he probably burned alive haunted me. That's something I'll never forget.

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I hate it when people don't pay attention to the safety instructions on planes. You can stop looking at your laptop or cellphone for a minute to learn what will save you life - AND MINE - if something goes wrong.

They also ought to include "In the event of an emergency landing, LEAVE YOUR FUCKING CARRY-ON BEHIND AND GET OFF THE PLANE, ASSHOLE."

... and the CSAR bird was forced into an emergency landing as well, reports say.

That's so funny. That's something I often *expect* to see. I didn't hear about this but that happened right down the street from me. I see planes in the air around John Wayne Airport all the time and every time I do I imagine one's coming down for an emergency landing on the street.

Never have I witnessed or heard about it actually happening here!

To be fair, I don't see "check all hollow volumes for the presence of small stowaway mammals" in the pre-flight checklist:
http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/presolo/skills/howtopreflight.html

A cat (or whatever) that doesn't want to be found probably isn't going to interfere with control surfaces working correctly, etc. This is exactly the kind of very infrequent, random event that human beings are likely to overlook when doing something like a routine check that comes back nominal 99.9% of the time.

So, I'd wager that the pilot probably did all of the checks correctly and they just failed to reveal the one-in-a-million chance of "cat in wing". And to swing the other direction a bit and praise him instead of admonishing, he was admirably cool as a cucumber while coming back in for a semi-emergency landing. So I guess I'd argue for "pilot win" instead of "pilot fail".

Tags for this video have been changed from 'helicopter, emergency, landing, crash, rescue, afghanistan' to 'helicopter, emergency, landing, crash, rescue, afghanistan, Mi 8 possibly' - edited by calvados

I often find myself thinking that airplanes should have some kind of foghorn to alert road traffic if they're coming down for an emergency landing because there's no way for cars to know the plane is coming down until it's passed you. It's easy if there's a big gap in traffic as seen above, but on my freeways, which are near an airport, that's very rare. (I actually think about this every single day every time a small plane is flying nearby. I keep thinking "Today will be the day a the plane comes down for a landing.")

If that were the US, the cars behind the plane would be honking, flashing their high beams, and swerving around them while giving the finger.

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Any background available on this?

Emergency landing to fix electronics with a hammer, emergency service, secret vodka stash in the forest, hunting wolves, taking a piss?

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Frequently the "Emergency Landing" is simply being low on fuel and not able to make it to another airport... happens when the intended airport is shutdown. Sometimes due to weather, doesn't allow night landings, or is being used by the military.